SPORTS OF THE TIMES: SUPER BOWL XXIX

SPORTS OF THE TIMES: SUPER BOWL XXIX; A Window of Hope Slams on A.F.C. Fan

By WILLIAM C. RHODEN

Published: January 30, 1995

MIAMI—
FOOLED again. I'm sitting in half-empty Joe Robbie Stadium watching the final seconds of a game that was over at least an hour before, wondering how I got suckered this time. Super duped into thinking that this would be the game. That after 11 seasons, going back to 1984, the San Diego Chargers would break the shackles that have followed the A.F.C. through a time line that began eons ago when the American Football League and the National Football League were blood rivals.

After all these years, the Big Brother-Little Brother relationship persists. The streak lives. Once again the N.F.C. takes candy from a baby. San Francisco 49, San Diego 26.

Downstairs in the sweaty, crowded losers locker room, Natrone Means, the Chargers' 245-pound running back, was sorting out his feelings. "Mad?" he said, repeating a question. "I'm more ashamed than I am mad."

In another corner, Junior Seau, the Chargers linebacker, was saying that the team needed to go back to its drawing board.

"We're definitely going to have to get better," he said. "It's frustrating. We're going to have to come back here and show that we really know how to play."

The A.F.C. has been singing this song for 11 years, singing it so well that its become a refrain: Got to get better.

I've just got to quit believing it.

Most of us came to Miami with the sense that San Diego didn't belong on the same field with San Francisco. That the game would turn out exactly as it turned out and we'd go home wondering what the heck is going on. Where's the competitive balance?

But the N.F.L. has a way of transmuting reality. Huge media day interview sessions and press conferences, and floods of statistics and dinners and banquets can seem to balance the odds. The Chargers had been killed by San Francisco just a couple months ago, but they told us not to believe our lying eyes. That was then, this is now and you wait until Sunday.

Most of the people here knew better. But I waited. Even hoped, though I'd had an inclination that something was amiss early in the day when a Charger official said that the owner named the team Chargers after his charge card company. All these years I thought the team emanated from the heavens.

When Jerry Rice scored the first touchdown three plays into game, I knew it was over. So did the Chargers.

"When a team comes out and scores right off the bat, it hurts you," Seau said. "You fall apart and start to panic."

San Diego's secondary was fooled, but not as badly as me. No team in Super Bowl history had scored a touchdown so quickly and by night's end, the 49ers would break nearly a dozen other records. The Chargers at least participated in one: The combined 75 points set a Super Bowl record.

Bobby Ross was telling the news media that it's bad, but not so bad. "After we get over the shock of this game," he said, "we'll feel proud about what we accomplished."

Sounds very A.F.L.-ish.

In another part of the locker room, Means was dealing in a more concrete reality. The shock of this embarrassment might never wash away.

"There may be a lot of positive things we can take out of the season," he said, "but I don't think there is one positive thing we can take out of that game."

My disappointment was more institutionalized. During the intermission, when Patti LaBelle and Tony Bennett sang a duet from Disney's "Lion King" in the midst of wild jungle finale, I realized where I'd gone wrong, why I'd kept hope alive for the A.F.C. I'd missed the transition and was living back in an era when the Super Bowl was a real blood feud between two competing businesses, two competing philosophies, two sets of wealthy guys playing out ego and power on a football field. Lamar Hunt and Bud Adams couldn't get N.F.L. franchises and so formed their own league -- the A.F.L. They were out to prove that they could take the N.F.L. rejects and retreads and undiscovered talent and do a good business.

The leagues merged and now there's only one rich, happy family. Entertainment is the key, the game is incidental and the A.F.C. is still little brother. You could sense it in some of the postgame questions when the Charger players were asked about moral victories. Moral victories? In a Super Bowl?

Means said that he didn't deal in moral victories and a 49-26 loss certainly didn't leave room for much morale.

"I look at the overall picture," he said. "To me, there were no moral victories in that game. In our season, yes, but to me you are only as good as your last game."

I came to Miami, sober enough, but and allowed myself to believe. But Super Bowl XXIX was over in the first quarter.

Fooled again.

Photo: Near game's end last night, those on the Charger bench wore the stunned look of someone perhaps hit by a steamroller, as indeed San Diego was. Junior Seau, downcast at game's end, said touchdown at start hurt. (Jose R. Lopez/The New York Times);